The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation had spent years litigating Reid v. UAW when it lost in the Tenth Circuit in 1973. The workers in the case objected to the United Auto Workers spending fees they were required to pay on political activity. The district court told them to use the union’s rebate procedure; the appeals court agreed. The Foundation could have asked the Supreme Court to hear the case. It didn’t.
“After careful review,” the Foundation later recalled, “we decided that Reid was not the best case.”
A few years later, the Foundation represented Howard Ellis and more than 200 other Western Airlines employees who objected to fees collected by the Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks. They won in district court and lost on appeal, where one judge dissented. “Because of the strength of the District Court opinion, and the dissent,” the Foundation later wrote, “we decided that Ellis was the right case.” The Supreme Court took it and in 1984 ruled unanimously that objecting workers could not be charged for some union activities unrelated to collective bargaining.
Case selection is part of what the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation does. Founded in 1968, it describes its mission as eliminating “coercive union power and compulsory unionism abuses” through strategic litigation, public information and education. Its own account of its litigation strategy describes Supreme Court cases as a way to establish precedents that can then be enforced and extended in other cases.
There is a lot of good writing about the organization. In a 2018 Nation investigation, Moshe Marvit went back to its founding by a group of anti-union businessmen in the 1950s and followed it through Janus. There’s also Jon Shelton on the Committee’s campaign against labor-law reform in the 1970s, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer on postwar right-to-work campaigns and the growth of anti-union conservatism, and Sophia Lee on the right-to-work movement’s litigation strategy.
There are some great details in the record. For instance, the National Right to Work’s direct-mail operation eventually became large enough that its Springfield, Virginia, headquarters got its own ZIP code: in 1977, it was sending 25 million pieces of mail a year and spending nearly $2 million on postage. According to FEC records, in 1984, the Committee spent $100,000 on private investigators who infiltrated the AFL-CIO, the National Education Association, and Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign, looking for evidence that unions were illegally using their money to support Mondale.
By then, National Right to Work also had a separate legal operation, the one that had brought Reid and Ellis. Reed Larson, who ran the Committee for decades, had been an engineer at the Coleman Company in Wichita before taking leave from his job in the 1950s to work on the campaign for a right-to-work law in Kansas. By the 1960s, he had concluded that the political and legislative operation needed a counterpart in the courts.
In a 1996 speech, Larson recalled having decided years earlier that unless organized labor’s political power was curtailed, “the free enterprise system as we know it” was headed for extinction. In 1967, he asked the Committee’s board for permission to establish a separate litigation organization. The National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation received its tax exemption in January 1968.
Larson knew whose lawyers he wanted to copy.
“The model for our Foundation was the NAACP Legal Defense Fund,” he said. He had watched the organization change national policy through litigation. “That’s exactly what we decided to do with Right to Work issues.” The borrowing went beyond litigation strategy. As Sophia Lee has written, Larson studied the NAACP Legal Defense Fund before establishing the Foundation and modeled its charter after it.
National Right to Work borrowed the language of civil rights too. The organization presented compulsory unionism as an oppression of minorities, aiming to reach black workers with the argument. In 1973, a supporter wrote to Ebony claiming that Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported voluntary unionism. No matter that King, who was killed while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, had denounced right-to-work laws, calling “right to work” a “false slogan” intended “to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining.”
The effort to make National Right to Work seem respectable was deliberate. A former Committee public-relations director told the New York Times in 1977 that he and another consultant had spent years establishing the organization’s credibility. “You could go into the New Republic or the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock and be welcome,” he said, “not be regarded as some right winger that had to be frisked.”
Abood v. Detroit Board of Education began with a group of Detroit public-school teachers who did not belong to the teachers’ union but were still required to pay it a service fee equivalent to dues. The Foundation represented the teachers, who challenged the arrangement on First Amendment grounds. The 1977 decision gave it only part of what it wanted. The Court upheld fees that paid for collective bargaining but barred unions from using objecting workers’ money for political and ideological activity unrelated to that work. A Foundation lawyer later summarized the result just that way: “The Supreme Court disagreed with our first argument, but agreed with our second argument.”
The Foundation spent the next decade pushing at that distinction. Harry Beck was a Maryland telephone worker represented by the Communications Workers of America. Foundation lawyers represented him for twelve years. In 1988, the Supreme Court held in Communications Workers v. Beck that the National Labor Relations Act did not permit unions to charge objecting workers for activities beyond those related to their duties as bargaining representative.
Eight years later, the Foundation launched Operation Liberty Bell.
It bought radio, television and print advertisements telling workers about rights established in Beck and other cases and directed them to its new website. Larson said polling showed that 78 percent of union members did not know those rights existed. In his October 1996 speech, which he called “To Beck and Beyond,” Larson said he would hold a press conference two days later to announce several new lawsuits that had come out of Operation Liberty Bell. More, he said, would follow.
At the time, he said the Foundation’s ten full-time lawyers were involved in 433 legal actions. Marvit found that beginning in 1985, the Foundation had appealed cases and filed Supreme Court amicus briefs at roughly the same volume as the NAACP. A FOIA request turned up more than 1,000 Foundation cases at the National Labor Relations Board between 2000 and 2014. “Anytime there is a union-organizing campaign or election, a strike, or other activity where dissent can be exploited,” Marvit wrote, “one can find the committee and the foundation.”
Larson’s speeches could get pretty hysterical. In a 1999 address at Hillsdale College, Larson said compulsory unionism supplied “the fuel that drives the liberal political machine.” Without the political power of union officials, he said, fights against “tax and spend, big government schemes” could be won “hands down.”
In 2012, Foundation lawyers won Knox v. SEIU, involving a special assessment charged by a California public-sector union. Two years later, in Harris v. Quinn, they represented Illinois home-care workers who objected to paying fees to SEIU. The Court ruled for the workers without overturning Abood. Mark Mix, Larson’s successor, later described Knox and Harris as having “laid the groundwork” for Janus. In a 2021 fundraising letter, he wrote that union and government “oversteps” could provide Foundation lawyers with “key opportunities to set new legal precedents.”
In 2016, another challenge to Abood reached the Supreme Court. Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association had been brought by a different group of lawyers on behalf of California teachers. Justice Antonin Scalia died before the Court ruled. The justices split 4–4, leaving the lower-court decision, and Abood, in place.
Foundation lawyers already had other cases underway. A statement the org issued that day said its lawyers had five more cases working their way through the courts.
By early 2017, the Foundation was publicly talking about two cases that could reach the Supreme Court that year. One was Serna v. Transport Workers Union, brought by airline employees in Texas. The other was Janus v. AFSCME. There were additional Foundation cases elsewhere, but Janus got there first.
Janus had started as a lawsuit by Illinois governor Bruce Rauner. Soon after taking office in 2015, Rauner issued an executive order blocking the collection of fair-share fees from state workers who did not belong to their unions, then asked a federal court to declare the fees unconstitutional. But Rauner wasn’t a state employee paying the fees, which raised the obvious question of whether he was the person who could bring the case. The Liberty Justice Center, a Chicago-based conservative public-interest law firm, went looking for someone who was. Its own history of the case says that its lawyers “set out to find state employees” who objected to paying union fees. They found three, including Mark Janus. Lawyers from Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Foundation moved to intervene on their behalf. The district court dismissed Rauner but allowed the employees’ case to continue.
Abood was still the law, so Janus lost in district court and again on appeal. That was what put the case in front of the Supreme Court. On June 27, 2018, the Court ruled 5–4 for Janus and overturned Abood. Public-sector unions could no longer collect agency fees from workers who declined to join.
There had been fights over the Foundation’s role in these cases almost from the beginning. In the 1970s, the UAW and other unions sued over the money it received from employers. The unions argued that employer money was effectively paying for challenges to unions themselves. The case was still kicking around in 1986, when the D.C. Circuit ruled that the unions hadn’t shown donors choosing the Foundation’s cases or directing its lawyers. The record before the court said staff attorneys chose the cases, while contributions went into a general fund.
Janus was hardly the last case. The Foundation still offers free legal help to workers who want to challenge their unions.
Foundation Action, the org’s newsletter, is still running too. The March/April 2026 issue reported on employees at three Milwaukee-area funeral homes who had gotten rid of Teamsters Local 344 representation with help from Foundation lawyers. The headline was “Funeral Home Workers Win Vote to Bury Unwanted Teamsters ‘Representation.’”
So an 8 hour working day, 2 days off a week and minimum wage have all been gained because of UNIONS. Honesty I prefer this rather than be at the mercy of an employer that doesn’t have to guarantee these rights. Deluded thinking calling these benefits Slavery. Oops sorry didn’t realise you were being ironic.
Really well done, thanks!